grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

Hmm, it appears that your are writing '10' in octal. That's kinda cool.

Anyway my last few are:

Current: Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Giver - Lois Lowry (Yes I realize this is a Caldecot award winner, but it only took me a couple of evenings, and it was fun).
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Tom Paine Maru - L. Neil Smith
Olympos - Dan Simmons

Currently on hiatus: Blood Music - Greg Bear

I'm not a fast reader, and tend to read just before bed so I tend to fall asleep after only a few pages, so it's tough for me to finish a book in less than a couple of months.

The next few books on my list:

1) 1421, the story of how the Chinese supposedly discovered America. I'm in the middle of it now, and I get the feeling that some of his leaps aren't as justified as he'd like us to think. But the tidbits about the places in question are nonetheless fascinating. The pieces of the puzzle that he presents are interesting, even if they don't add up as he'd like us to think.

2) The Children of Hurin, the novelization of part of the Silmarillion.

3) The Wisdom of Crowds by Surowiecki. It's all about polls, prediction markets, and other situations where aggregated information leads to better conclusions than asking an expert.

4) Anna Karenina

5) Flatland I'm fascinated by the physics of lower dimensions, and have sometimes thought of soliciting a compilation of articles on science in 2D systems. Gravity, optics, electromagnetism, even phenomena of biology like diffusion and fluid flow and membrane stability would be different. So I want to read this book, and then embark on my goal of creating a "Science of Flatland" book.

6) Whatever the new book by the Kiterunner author is.

Hmm, Ectromagnetics would be the big one that would be very difficult to reproduce in a 2D environment, given that a changing electric field and creates an orthogonal magnetic feild, and you're limited on possible orthogonality in 2D. My guess would be that you couldn't have an electromagnet in a 2D world, and that thus large-scale electricity, electromagnetic communications, and who knows what else would simply be physically impossible.

But the math to prove that is beyond me for the moment.

Yup. All sorts of things would attenuate at 1/r. It'd certainly be wacky.

I'll admit that I can't figure out how a scalar magnetic field would work - for the magnetic field to induce a force perpendicular to the movement of the particle, it still has to have some directionality, doesn't it? Maybe not. I mean, how would you differentiate the 'handedness' of the force?

It occurs to me that when we may have a really distorted view of what summer reading should be.

Well, if the force is perpendicular to the velocity then there's only one direction it can lie along, the only issue would be sign, which would depend on the charge and the field strength.

Instead of trying to figure out how to define the magnetic field, maybe it's better to first derive the magnetic force in 2D, in the same manner that Schwarz and Purcell both do, where they start from electrostatics and relativity, and show that when you change from one inertial reference frame to another the force acquires a velocity-dependent term.

There would still be a velocity-dependent force, you'd just have to write it with scalars and rotation operators instead of vector cross products.

Not to mention the vast intellectual differences between a 3D network of interconnected neurons and a 2D arrangement of wires and transistors.

Yeah, I realize that the differences are a bit bigger than that, but the interconnections that are possible in 3D, and the possibilities for parallel information transfer and processing, will be either impossible or far less efficient in 2D.

I have about a thousand books going at the moment, as tends to happen when I make a library run and then start leaving things in various places and not remembering where I put them. I have:

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle -- David is reading this to me on car trips.

Living the Good Life and then Continuing the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, a fascinating couple who got kicked out of academia back in the thirties for their anarchist, pacifist views, and became back-to-the-landers in Vermont and later Maine.

The Book of Tofu by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi (my bonus came through and I'm getting a soymilk machine ... mwahaha)

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron - a collection of essays. So funny.

We're Just Like You, Only Prettier by Celia Rivenbark - a collection of Southern-themed essays. Grabbed on a whim, good choice so far, if a little overly in love with itself.

First Person Rural by Noel Perrin - collection of essays by a Vermont farmer.

Planned (so far) are:
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and Pseudoscientific, Snobby Blather
- Freakonomics
- some Thomas Sowell economics books
- something for Around the World in 80 Books
- Born on a Blue Day (my mom's recommendation)
- The Vegan Sourcebook

Summer is my reading season.

I'm not sure how stable a cell membrane would be in 2D, because it would be a 1D ring rather than a 2D surface. I think it would be stable, but there are some subtleties in that sort of physics that depend very strongly on the dimensionality of the system.

Thoreau, FWIW my son just finished this version of "Flatland" He really enjoyed the witty annotation by the mathematician Ian Stewart. Stewart explains much of Abbot’s social criticism as well as the state of mathematics at the time.

Shit dude, you can fake it. Just nod and look thoughtful through the discussions of math, and then wave your arms enthusiastically and pontificate wildly when the discussion doesn't involve math you can't understand. It's really unfortunate the way that worked for me in Theory of Seismology and the linear programing part of Geophysical Inverse Theory.

Hey, down at the cellular level, aren't all macroscopic creatures just a collection of discrete units called cells that kinda stick together most of the time and exchange nutrients and waste products with each other? Maybe we are overdoing this "must be all one contiguous piece" thing. As long as there is a way to hold most of the separate pieces together most of the time ...

On the macroscopic level, organs for eating and breathing, for example, could be discrete "sacks" (more like long skinny horseshoe shapes) that would be contained (along with all the other separate organs) inside a roughly horseshoe-shaped overall container that we might call "the skin." The eating and breathing organs would take in outside air and food, break it down, and extract oxygen and nutrients in it, and then push the oxygen and nutrients into an external fluid that would carry it around to the body. The single opening in the "skin" -- the cloaca? monolacuna? -- might be kept closed by a valve (two pseudopods extending from the inside wall of the main throat. The "lung" would continually push its own throat out through the cloaca (with the valve pushing tight against it to maintain a seal), expand to create a vacuum and inhale air, then withdraw inside the throat, filter out the oxygen, excrete the oxygen into its internal circulatory fluid, then push out through the cloaca again to expel waste products and draw in another breath.

The stomach would do something similar -- push its throat out through the cloaca to eat something, break it down, eject nutrients internally, and eject waste products out through the cloaca. This means the creature would essential be defecating through its mouth, but I think some Earthly organisms do this already. Snails or conches or something -- I'll have to look that up. (Except I'm really, really, really afraid to Google "defecate" and "mouth.")

Internal divisions (2D but narrow membranes) would consist of smaller "cells" that would cling to each other by means of hook-shaped cilia, like 2D Velcro. They could pull apart to create small temporary holes for nutrients and stuff to pass through but would have some kind of "controphic" reflext that would cause them to swim together and latch up again after a short time. Once the Velcro hooks contacted they would pull tight to draw the cells against each other in a tight seal. (Like two people linking arms, then each pulling their arms in tight against their torsos.) Thus, internal divisions would be somewhat porous and allow nutrients to gain access to the insides of organs.

Cilia on the inner walls of the main horshoe ("skin") and on the all the serfaces of the main organs would help to circulate the internal fluid around, perhaps also in conjunction with more valves or internal paddles.

The organism might have accidents where it accidentally vomits out one or more of its internal organs through the cloaca. Hopefully the main valve in the throat of the cloaca would inhibit this possibility, but it still might happen from time to time. Maybe the expelled organ would than have a reflex to use its cilia-covered surface to swim back into the cloaca and inside the organism. Probably the biggest hazard associated with the temporary escape of an organ would be the loss of a lot of internal circulatory fluid. Maybe the organism would need internal sacks of back-up circulatory fluid (pockets in the internal surface of the "skin" or maybe free-floating sacks inside), normally closed up tight, in case of such emergencies. Or maybe it would just die if it accidentally ralphed out too much circulatory fluid.

Those are just some gross macroscopic ideas. The smaller in scale you go, the less I know what I'm talking about.

Ironically, Jennifer, I'm very skeptical of the idea of a two-dimensional critter having a phallus. ;)

I'm loving this.

Of course, I have no idea how the 2D versions of atoms and molecules would work, so I can't speculate much about scales smaller than the organ level.

I like the nomenclature of "mantle."

Would there still be boobies?

Hmmm. Honestly, I could probably dig a world where all femalse constantly undulated and displayed themselves from all angles. But instead of humming "I'm not out to get you" they would be singing, "Let Me Entertain You," or possibly, "Hey, Big Spender."

Or else hum "The Stripper." Perhaps that would be best.

The males were just the figureheads. Everyone knew the females ruled everything, and the humming was just there to distract foolish males from the deadly work of the woman-ninja.

no, read. otherwise i get annoyed sometimes. i mean i do read literature, but it's like 15% of what i read.

i often think thank god i never got into drugs and fantasy fiction in middle school because i'd be posting here from a warhammer 40k convention. also, i'd be posting to alt.fanfic.lawandorder.

bullet: dodged!